Take a guess, how many golf-cart related injuries do you think take place every year in the US?

Ten? A hundred? Around a thousand?

Nope. According to a Nationwide Children’s Hospital study, 2006 saw an estimated 13,411 cases of gold-cart related injuries.

13,411. In 2006. In the US alone.

I mean, considering that escalators annually injure between 7,500 to 10,000 in the US (depending on whose statistics you believe), 13,411 golf-cart related injuries just seems insane.

And, apparently “[m]ore than 30 percent of golf cart-related injuries involved children under the age of 16.” What on earth were they doing there? Do children under 16 play golf?

I of course did, but there was no chance I would have fallen off a golf-cart there. And in my current golfing career I haven’t even got past choosing what colour hair I want to have, so no chance of falling of golf-carts there.

Which, of course, raises the question how many gaming related injuries occur yearly. Curiously enough, my web search skills (or the lack of them) couldn’t produce any data. Does anyone know? Or is this a dark secret closely guarded by the gaming industry, and am I to expect the front door to be kicked in any moment now?

Britain’s RSPB, which for the past 60 years has kept records of around 400 pairs engaged in sexual activity at Wytham Woods, Oxford, has found out that great tits cope well with global warming. Really.

The full story can be accessed here.

Yesterday, I praised the brilliant DAA2ISO program that converts PowerISO’s proprietary DAA files into more usable ISO images. Today, I ask if you have ever had problems trying to open a UIF file (MagicISO’s proprietary format)?

Because if you have, then again look no further than to Luigi Auriemma’s collection of programs. The program you want this time around is called UIF2ISO, and it does a perfect job converting UIF files to ISO.

Now, if only Auriemma could come up with a program that converts dirty dishes into washed-up dishes, and I think I would be ready to marry the guy.

Ever had the problem of finding yourself faced with a big fat DAA disk image and no PowerISO to open it with, nor any intention of installing the program?

I have. Fortunately, there is a handy little tool called DAA2ISO that works marvels. Do take a look at Luigi Auriemma’s collection of programs. I have so far failed to encounter a DAA file that it could not convert to ISO.

Andy Baio has posted an interesting article based on a shared network drive that Infocom used in 1989.

Infocom, of course, is/was the company behind such text adventures — sorry, interactive fiction titles — as the Zork series, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and my personal favourite Planetfall. Baio’s article gives us a piece of history that is Milliways: The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, the unreleased sequel to Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

It is a fairly long article, but well worth reading, as are the comments at the end of it. Doubly interesting is the question that it raises, somewhat unintentionally, about what constitutes (good) journalism and what one should do if one were to find a pot of gold like Baio has here stumbled upon.

I have no answers, as usual. Just observations.

I don’t know about you, but I’m a sucker for addictive game play. For the past three months or so, I’ve spent far too much time playing Chain Factor, a Flash based browser game where you drop discs into a grid. I mainly play the “Survival” mode, as its quite fast and makes you think while not overly complicating things.

Try it out and see if you can beat my current score of 814,305 that gives me a place in the top 50. I’m submitting my scores as “vili”.